Humans have always been interested in their origins, but historians have been reluctant to write about the long stretches of time before the invention of writing. This book maps events, cultures, and eras across millions of years to present a scale for understanding the human body, energy and ecosystems, language, food, kinship, and more.

List of Figures Preface A Note on Dates PART ONE. PROBLEMS AND ORIENTATIONS 1. Introduction Andrew Shryock and Daniel Lord Smail 2. Imagining the Human in Deep Time Andrew Shryock, Thomas R. Trautmann, and Clive Gamble PART TWO. FRAMES FOR HISTORY IN DEEP TIME 3. Body Daniel Lord Smail and Andrew Shryock 4. Energy and Ecosystems Mary C. Stiner and Gillian Feeley-Harnik 5. Language April McMahon, Thomas R. Trautmann, and Andrew Shryock PART THREE. SHARED SUBSTANCE 6. Food Felipe Fernandez-Armesto with Daniel Lord Smail 7. Deep Kinship Thomas R. Trautmann, Gillian Feeley-Harnik, and John C. Mitani PART FOUR. HUMAN EXPANSION 8. Migration Timothy Earle and Clive Gamble with Hendrik Poinar 9. Goods Daniel Lord Smail, Mary C. Stiner, and Timothy Earle 10. Scale Mary C. Stiner, Timothy Earle, Daniel Lord Smail, and Andrew Shryock Notes Bibliography Contributors Index

“Ranging across the disciplines, this truly collaborative team cuts through the constraints of our previous notions of historical understanding and points towards a fundamental new way of thinking about history.”—Lynn Hunt, author of Measuring Time, Making History

“In recent decades, history as a discipline has increasingly portrayed humans as an exception in the story of life, as though all other life-forms were part of nature but humans somehow were not, or not quite. This book issues a profound and timely challenge to that implicit assumption and argues for an integration of deep and recorded human pasts. The challenge is profound, because it is at once methodological and philosophical, and it is timely in the way it resonates with concerns about our growing ecological footprint on the planet. This collaborative enterprise will appeal to students of human pasts in a variety of disciplines.” —Dipesh Chakrabarty, author of Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference

“Leading scholars in deep history have been brought together from a variety of disciplines in this ambitious project. The result is constantly exciting. I read barely a page that didn’t cause me to reconsider how we might tell the human story.”—Martin Jones, University of Cambridge

“In Deep History: The Architecture of Past and Present, a multi-disciplinary team of historians, archeologists, paleontologists, primatologists, and anthropologists takes up the challenge of incorporating the past six million or so years into the record of human history. Combining open minds with scholarly rigor, the authors use linguistics and genetics, trails of bones, shells and crafted objects, dietary traditions, and kinship rules to follow our footloose species out of Africa and around the globe, along the way dismantling barriers between disciplines that have outlived their usefulness.” —Sarah B. Hrdy, author of Mother Nature: A History of Mothers, Infants, and Natural Selection